I will be gone for 4 days celebrating the new year with my family and I wont be posting any messages during this time.

But I would like to wish everyone of you a Happy New Year 2009, filled with good health, love, laughs and sunshine!!!

See you next year!



(I don't know who's the artist for that picture... if anyone can help...)

Ruud Van Empel

Ruud Van Empel is a photograph that works and lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Gratuate from Academy of Fine Arts Sint Joost Breda in 1981, his work will be on display on januray 29th at the Stux Gallery in New York. Ruud Van Empel also has a new book coming out in january presenting new series of his work.

Jason Walker

Jason Walker moved to Canada in 1990, where he set up studio as a professional portrait painter. I am posting pictures of his donut series (no portraits here) because I can't beleive how realistic they look and I love the singleness they represent.

Walker has painted the portraits of various celebrities and individuals including the portrait of Wayne Gretzky for his induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame and won an American Society of Portrait Artist's award in 1998. Along with ongoing commissions, Mr. Walker paints extensively from his own interests and his paintings are now being collected internationally. In addition to his portraiture, Mr. Walker is also a designer, animator and digital compositor: his work for national television has garnered three North American Broadcast Design Awards.

This is what Wlaker says of his work :

« I am a painter who prefers the work to speak for itself. I believe that the relationship between the painting and the viewer is one that benefits from intimacy, without voice-over. It is as Duchamp says: “the viewer completes the work." (GdB)



Although photography has taken over many of the duties of contemporary portraiture I obviously prefer the painted subject. To paint the sitter is to have an intense encounter with that image and with art history at the same time. I often work from photographs (as well as from the model) but photography interests me only as aid to memory. I work in oil on linen and have chosen to concentrate on the single figure. I invest each image with significant detail and try to achieve not simply a physical likeness but also to unveil a psychological truth: to show a state of being in the world. I paint actual, living people in a high realist manner because I am not interested in the illusions of the classical or idealized figure. In a culture so concerned with celebrity, with youth and with perfection, to be elderly, anonymous, handicapped, marginalized or less than perfect often means invisibility. But such people are often the subject of my work. I try to convey the complexity of lived experience by depicting a full range of the human spectrum. In that regard the sitter becomes exalted by the scrutiny of the artist’s gaze, by the act of being painted. He or she is given sustained attention where in everyday life they may be often overlooked. In that sense my work also refers to the richness of art history itself. Such artists as Diego Velasquez and his The Dwarf Sebastian de Morra inform my work. Or Caravaggio whose works such as The Incredulity of Saint Thomas are the very embodiment of shadow and light on flesh. Or the unsparing portraits of ordinary people in ordinary settings by Lucien Freud. It is with all this in mind that I try to paint the subject before me.»

John Grant

John Grant's photography is poetic, simple, peaceful and gorgeous. Botanical elements are his subjects of choice. They are presented in a single way that emphasizes their color and their characteristics.

John Grant is a co-founder of the fine art publishing group "Thomasson- Grant". Now he is back to his original interests and instinctive love of photography, experimenting with new technological tools and techniques. He is represented by Getty Images worldwide, and by Kathleen Ewing Gallery in Washington, D. C. He works out of his home studio in Charlottesville.

Pierre le Monkeyman?

The Monkeyman is Pierre Beteille. This is what he says about his work : «I am not a photographer or an artist, I just make images . I shoot very average or even bad photos that I try to improve thanks to Photoshop .» I don't know if I have to agree with him... cause really, I don't. I think whatever Pierre says, he is an artist and a photographer. Surely not a monkeyman. Well, what do you think?
(Via trend.land)

Steven Nederveen

Steven Nederveenstudied fine art at Medicine Hat College and went on to receive a Bachelor of Design from the University of Alberta in 1995. The following year he moved to Vancouver (1996-2000) where Steven practiced meditation and found that this experience combined with the beauty of the landscape greatly contributed to his growth as a person and an artist. It was these moments that lead Steven to use painting to draw connections between our natural environment and aspects of spirituality. By blurring the lines between photography and painting, he develops a magical realism that inspires us to see the world with new eyes. By using distressing and aging the work he creates the sense of past and present, of struggle and transformation. A glass-like layer of resin coats each painting enhancing the clarity of the image and reflecting the viewer into the work.(GdB)

Simon Casson

Simon Casson's paintings are statement of pure uniqueness. Casson playfully combines pre-existing elements from the entire oeuvre of visual art to discover an unprecedented form of History Painting. (GdB)

On Artnet

Darlene Cole

At the age of 36, Darlene Cole has become one of the most sought after young artists in Canada. After graduating from Queen's University, she completed a Masters of Fine Arts at the Unversity of Waterloo. Since then, her paintings have appeared in numerous exhibitions throughout Canada and the United States, as well as in corporate and private collections around the world.

At first blush, Cole's ingenious oil technique could be mistaken for watercolour. Her soft dreamscapes could be blithe reflections on childhood, or celebrations of an era lost to time. But a closer look reveals something more forceful behind the sunny scenes. The narrative tension in her work is palpable. The ravages of adulthood are always uncomfortably close at hand. Cole has cast on us a masterfull spell of suspended childhood, heightening the urgency of our memories with a reminder, if not a warning, that the past, though easily evoked, can never be re-claimed.

Darlene Cole lives and works in Brooklin, Ontario.(GdB)

Paul Béliveau

I am completely lost in admiration of Paul Béliveau's paintings. I find them intelligent, colorful, fun and obviously beautiful.

Born in 1954, Paul Béliveau attained his Bachelor's degree in Visual Arts from Laval University in 1977. Recognized for his expertise in drawing, engraving and painting he has since then had more than sixty solo exhibitions across Canada and the United States. The recipient of numerous prizes in visual arts and of multiple grants from the Canada Council as well as the Ministère des Affaires Culturelles du Québec has taken part in several commitees and juries as specialist in the visual arts.

Steven Assael

Steven Assael was born in New York, New York in 1957. He attended Pratt Institute and presently teaches at The School of Visual Arts in New York. Mr. Assael balances naturalism with a romanticism that permeates the figures and surroundings of his paintings and drawings.

Assael has had several solo shows nationally in recent months, including the Columbus Museum of Art, Cress Gallery of Art at the University of Tennessee, Lowe Gallery in Atlanta, and Forum Gallery in Los Angeles. In 1999, a retrospective one-person exhibition was held at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, Washington. Steven Assael’s work has also been exhibited at The Arkansas Arts Center, (AR), The New York Academy of Art, (NY), The Arnot Art Museum in (NY) and is represented in the public collections of The Hunter Museum of Art in Chattanooga, (TN), The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art & Design (MO), The Columbus Museum of Art (Columbus, OH) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY). (Forum Gallery)

HO! HO! HO! Merry Christmas!

Le Zèbre bleu is wishing you all a wonderful happy Christmas.


Picture from here

Bettina Sellmann

Bettina Sellmann a Munich born painter who now lives in New-York is known for creating what she calls “see-through versions” of Old Master paintings.

She is on show now at the Derek Eller Gallery in New-York where she prensents artwork far more abstract but that has the same transparency and color plays. This is one of the paintings on view at the gallery, the one that caught my attention. There is something about that red spill that talks to me...